Cardi B's 'Bodak Yellow' tops the Billboard Hot 100 — first solo female rap #1 since Lauryn Hill

Why it matters

September 25, 2017. "Bodak Yellow" by Cardi B reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, displacing Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do." Cardi held #1 for three weeks. The chart performance ended a nineteen-year drought for solo women rappers at the top of the Hot 100, with the previous one being Lauryn Hill's "Doo Wop (That Thing)" in 1998. The gap is the part that should sit with you. From November 1998 to August 2017, no solo woman MC topped the Billboard Hot 100. That is nineteen years across the chart performance of Missy Elliott (whose "Work It" peaked at #2), Eve, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Trina, MIA, and most of Nicki Minaj's catalog before her The Pinkprint singles. The structural commercial-radio-and-streaming bias against women rappers had been one of the more consistent features of the genre. Cardi's "Bodak Yellow" did not single-handedly end the bias, but the chart number was the empirical proof that the bias could be broken. You should remember the 1998 to 2017 gap when you hear the next "why aren't more women rappers being played" complaint. The complaint is real. The fix is, on Cardi's chart performance, also real.